Security association storage and recovery in group key management

Abstract

A method for preserving security associations between at least two entities includes the steps of maintaining a security association relating to communication between the at least two entities in a table, and periodically storing the security association in non-volatile storage. With such an arrangement, in the event that data within the table become corrupted, it can be retrieved from storage. Because the key data is stored, performance losses due to re-establishing the secure group are minimized. In one embodiment, the security association is advantageously encrypted prior to storage to further secure the security associations for each member.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]This invention relates generally to the field of security and more particularly to a method and apparatus for maintaining key associations between a pair of entities.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]Exemplary multicast applications, such as video broadcast or multicast file transfer, transfer content to a defined secure group. A secure group is a collection of members who may be senders, receivers, or both senders and receivers of content. Group key management protocols ensure that only members of a secure group can gain access to group data and can authenticate group data by providing legitimate group members with the up-to-date cryptographic state that they need for their secrecy and authenticity requirements.[0003]According to the group key management protocol, group members receive security associations (SAs). A Security Association (SA) is a set of policy and cryptographic keys that provide security services to network traffic that matches that polic...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0007]According to one aspect of the invention, a method for preserving security associations between at least two entities includes the steps of maintaining a security association relating to communication between the at least two entities in a table, and periodically storing the security association in non-volatile storage. With such an arrangement, in the event that data within the table become corrupted, it can be retrieved from storage. Because the security association data is stored, performance losses due to re-establishing the secure group are minimized. In one embodiment, the security association is advantageously encrypted prior to storage to further secure the security associations for each member.

Problems solved by technology

One problem with the GCKS is that, in the event of a power failure or system re-boot, the registration SA, data SAs and other keying information for each member of the group is lost.

The loss of keys requires that each member re-register and new keys be re-distributed to the group, thereby reducing the performance of the multicast application.

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